About a month ago, Neal Lawson, a member of Labour since the late 70s, got a letter from the party’s governance and legal unit, inviting him to defend himself over a two-year-old tweet. His apparent offence? He had praised an example of cooperation between the Lib Dems and the Green party, saying: “This is what grown-up politics looks like.” If this was deemed to be an incitement to vote for a party other than Labour, he was warned, he would be in breach of party rules and expelled.
“Whether I’m a member of the Labour party or not is inconsequential,” Lawson insists, when I meet him in his south London offices. But it was quite a slap in the face for a man who has been so intimately involved with the party. He has spent 20 years as the head of the membership organisation Compass. Today, it focuses on the progressive alliance – how parties with shared values can cooperate to beat the Conservatives, rather than splitting the vote. But when he founded Compass in 2003, it was conceived as a critical friend to Labour, a sort of Cassandra-chorus of the soft left, to remind the government what its values were. Over the years, it has campaigned on issues such as high executive pay and loan sharks.
